Claudia Varela

Dr. Claudia Varela is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Tissue Microfabrication Lab.  Previous REU/RET Projects include: An In Vitro Model of the Infarct Border Zone (2024)

Population Responses of Living Neural Networks to Periodic Drive

Mentors Project Description The hippocampal formation (HF) in mammals is responsible for collecting information about the sensory world and, if appropriate, storing that information as memories, to be offloaded to other brain structures later. The HF has a number of notable response properties, including nested, quasi-periodic activity. In this project, the student will work with […]

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An In Vitro Model of the Infarct Border Zone

Mentors Project Description The severity of a heart attack is determined by the area of heart muscle affected by the occluded vessel, but also by a‘border zone’ (BZ) that separates the infarct region from the unaffected heart muscle. The BZ has been implicated in adverse remodeling that occurs after a heart attack, but because the […]

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Christopher Chen

Dr. Christopher Chen is the principal investigator at the Tissue Microfabrication Lab. The lab’s projects include vascular, cardiac, and stem cell biology and engineering. Goals of the lab include building biomimetic tissues as experimental models and to direct tissue remodeling and regeneration through understanding how adhesive, mechanical and biochemical interactions drive cell and tissue function.  This year, Dr. Chen’s REU project is Engineering Vascular Beds that […]

Michael Albro

Dr. Albro has dedicated much of his research toward the role of mechanical loading in biological tissues, namely through the progression and treatment of osteoarthritis. In doing so, he hopes to advance the strategies of engineering tissue cartilage at a molecular level.  Previous REU/RET Projects include: Raman Spectroscopic Diagnostics of Invertebrate Disk Degeneration (2022)

Michael McLellan

In 2022, Michael worked with Xining Gao to mentor Sharvari Apte (REU) at the Chen Lab.

David Bishop

In addition to a focus on low temperature physics, Dr. Bishop has a wide variety of research interests, including the study of cardiac tissue engineering, micro-electromechanical (MEMS) systems and nano-electromechanical systems (NEMS), the Casimir Effect, superconductivity and superfluidity, nanotechnology, and feedforward control theory algorithms. Previous REU/RET Projects Include: Coupled Oscillator Simulations (2023) Chip-scale Magnetocardiography (REM […]

Thomas Bifano

Dr. Bifano directs the Boston University Photonics Center (BUPC), a core facility and academic center of excellence comprised of forty-nine faculty members from eight academic departments and sixteen staff staff members. He leads BUPC programs for education, scholarly research and development of advanced photonics device prototypes for commercial and military applications. His research focuses on design, […]